The snatcher camp smelled like wet canvas and unwashed men. A fire burned low in the centre, three tents arranged in a rough triangle around it. Thirteen of them total. Harry knew because Daphne had spent forty minutes on a perimeter scout while the rest of them stood perfectly still in the tree line, breathing frost.
Thirteen was manageable. Thirteen was almost insulting.
“Three tents,” Daphne murmured when she dropped back into position. She wasn’t even winded. “Four in the first, three in the second, two in the last. Two more at the fire. One scout walking a lap on the outer circle, every eight minutes. Same route every time.”
“Same route every time,” Tonks muttered. “Amateurs.”
“The Death Eater?” Fleur asked.
“Donaldson.” Harry had done his own reconnaissance that afternoon, long-range scrying from above the tree line. “Mid-rank. Not inner circle. He keeps a reserve wand in his boot, right side.”
Susan Bones gave a single nod. She’d gone quiet the last ten minutes, which was normal for her before a fight. Some people got louder when tension built. Susan got cold and still and focused, like a knife being drawn slowly out of a sheath. Harry had clocked that early.
Hermione was on his left. Her wand was gripped in both hands, something she’d stopped doing weeks ago, so he noticed it.
He leaned toward her. “You’re alright,” he said, barely a sound.
She let out a slow breath and loosened her grip. “Yeah, I know. I’m fine.”
She was, mostly. The squeamishness hadn’t gone away and they’d all stopped pretending it would. What had changed was she’d found a way to be useful around it. In a fight that meant covering angles, laying ward disruptions, making sure nobody beside her ever had to check their shoulder. The actual killing she left to others when she could manage it. When she couldn’t, she did what needed doing and dealt with herself afterward. Harry had stopped trying to talk her out of that arrangement. It worked.
“On your signal,” Daphne said.
Harry raised two fingers. Held them. Dropped.
They moved.
Fleur and Tonks took the outer loop. They split at fifteen paces and came at the scout from opposite directions. The man had just turned at the top of his circuit when Fleur’s curse hit him from the right. He dropped mid-step — no stagger, no sound, just down. Tonks was already coming from the left, her wand up, guiding the body to the dirt before it could make noise.
No flash of light from either of them. They’d both stopped using spells that produced light months ago. Light meant target.
Tonks set the body down in the shadow of a pine trunk. She looked across at Fleur, who was already sweeping the perimeter. Fleur raised one finger.
Tonks mouthed, obviously. Fleur mouthed something back that was almost certainly French and not complimentary, and went right.
Susan and Daphne took the first tent.
Susan went in low while Daphne held the entrance, standing just outside the canvas with her wand up. What followed was brief and not quiet — a sharp impact, a shout cut off, heavy sounds of bodies that had stopped cooperating. Four men, four spells, under twenty seconds. Daphne tracked two shapes near the fire and confirmed they hadn’t heard, then went back to watching the entrance.
Susan came out pulling her sleeve down over a cut along her left forearm where someone had gotten a knife free before going down. She looked at it the way you’d look at something inconvenient rather than alarming, pressed the fabric against it and moved without comment toward the second tent.
Daphne was already ahead of her.
The second tent went faster because it only had three men and they were sleeping. Susan and Daphne moved through it with the precision they’d built from weeks of drilling together, Daphne taking the left side while Susan went right, both of them casting before the first man had fully registered what was happening.
Harry and Hermione took the fire.
The two men sitting there heard them at the last second. One started to stand. The other grabbed for his wand. Harry’s curse took the man on his feet mid-motion and folded him back down without a sound. The second managed to get his wand up and threw something that went wide into the trees before Hermione’s hex caught him in the chest.
He went down but he was still moving.
Hermione stood over him and raised her wand and stopped. Her jaw was set and her eyes were clear. She wasn’t confused. She just couldn’t make her arm complete the motion. There was something in her that balked at the final step, had balked every single time, and she’d learned by now that fighting it in the middle of an op cost more than she could afford.
She processed it later. She came back the next time and was steadier.
Harry stepped forward and finished it.
He stepped back. Hermione turned away. Neither of them said anything. That was the arrangement — unspoken, functional, arrived at over several weeks and never once formally discussed. She covered everything up to the last moment with precision, and then he covered the last moment, and she dealt with herself afterward, and she came back each time one degree steadier than before. Slow going. But going, which was the important part.
She turned back, composed, and they moved.
Susan was emerging from the second tent, face level the way it always was after an op, and she gave Hermione a brief glance. Hermione returned it with a short nod. No words needed. They’d developed a shorthand about this weeks ago. Susan had had her own version of it early on and had come out the other side somewhere different. She didn’t push. She didn’t dismiss. She just acknowledged it and moved on, which was exactly right and exactly what Hermione needed.
Donaldson came running from behind the second tent, and Harry was already facing him.
The Death Eater’s mask had slipped half off. His wand was up but his hand wasn’t steady, and he had the look of a man whose entire map of the situation had just been proven wrong in every direction at once. His eyes moved fast, taking inventory. Harry. Hermione behind him. Daphne rounding the far side of the tent. Tonks and Fleur coming in from the tree line. Susan by the tent entrance, pressing her sleeve against her forearm.
“Potter.” His voice was trying to stay level and not quite managing it. “I knew it was you lot. All these camps going dark, three weeks of dead snatchers and no reports coming in — I told them it was organised. I told them it wasn’t random—“
“How many were they sending to find me?” Harry said. He walked toward him, wand still at his side. Not raised. He didn’t need it raised. “Full teams? Solo trackers? What was the approach?”
Donaldson’s wand arm was shaking more visibly now. “The reports said you were working alone. That you’d been spotted on your own. So they sent pairs, small teams, nothing bigger than—“ He stopped. His eyes moved past Harry to Daphne, to Fleur, to Susan at the tent entrance. “There are six of you,” he said, almost to himself. “You just took twelve men in under five minutes.”
“About that,” Harry agreed.
“You were supposed to be easier than this. That’s what they said at the briefing — one boy, barely trained, lucky to have made it this long.” Donaldson’s jaw moved. “They said if anyone found you, it’d be straightforward.”
“People say all sorts of things.” Harry stopped six feet away. “You had Muggleborns here three days ago. A woman and two children. Where did they go?”
Donaldson blinked like he’d expected a completely different question. “They were transferred. Holding facility outside Coventry. I wasn’t on that rotation, I didn’t process them, it was—“
“Where’s Bellatrix Lestrange?” Harry said.
The name hit him like a stone. Donaldson went very still. The shakiness in his hands stopped, replaced by something worse — a rigid, comprehensive fear that moved through him visibly from his hands up through his shoulders and into his face. His wand arm dropped without him noticing.
“I don’t have access to that,” he said, picking each word carefully. “I’m not inner circle. I genuinely don’t know where she—“
“You don’t know her current location,” Harry agreed, stepping forward once more. “But you’ve been in a room with her. You were at a briefing.”
Donaldson started to say something. Harry went in before he could.
Legilimency done quickly on a resisting subject wasn’t what Snape had described in fifth year. Harry had practiced for weeks — first on his willing allies back at the manor and then on captured snatchers — developing something less like delicate mental surgery and more like something efficient and blunt and functional. He went in with a specific purpose, found the relevant material, and pulled out. The whole thing took about four seconds. To Donaldson it felt like someone had grabbed him by the inside of his skull.
What was there wasn’t much, but it was something.
A briefing in a stone-floored room with curved walls — a tower or an old mill. Bellatrix at the front, her posture one of aggressive ease, absolutely certain she was the most dangerous thing in the room. She was talking about the northeast territories, about intensifying pressure, about the Dark Lord’s requirements. Through the single window behind her, something moved slowly. Water, still and dark. Not a river. More contained — a canal, or a weir.
Stone walls. Curved. One window. Still dark water. Northeast.
Harry pulled out.
Donaldson was white-faced and swaying, wand arm hanging loose. “What did you — I felt you inside my — how did you—“
“Don’t worry about it,” Harry said. “You’ve been helpful.”
“Wait.” Donaldson’s voice cracked. “Wait. I can tell you more. There are plans — a movement scheduled for next month, a new wave of raids in the south, I can give you names, I can—“ His voice dropped lower. “I have a daughter. She’s eight. She’s with my mother in Cardiff. She doesn’t know what I’ve done, she’s just a child, she doesn’t deserve to lose—“
Harry looked at him.
There was, in fact, a daughter. There was also a memory sitting very near the surface of Donaldson’s mind, not even slightly buried — a clearing outside Luton three weeks ago where Donaldson had stood with his arms folded while snatchers dragged a Muggleborn family across frost-hardened grass toward a holding cage, the father on his knees begging, and Donaldson had watched, said nothing, and then joined in when the laughter started.
He’d made his choices. He’d kept making them.
“You’ve already told me what you know,” Harry said. “You just don’t know that you told me.”
Donaldson started backing away, faster now, stumbling, his heel catching on a root. He scrambled upright and was half-turning to run when Daphne stepped smoothly into his path. Her curse caught him full in the chest from four feet away. He dropped hard and lay still.
She stood over him for a moment with the expression Harry knew well by now — clear-eyed, a job assessed and completed. Not triumphant. Not conflicted. Just done.
“Third tent?” she said.
“Susan’s already in,” Tonks called from the tree line.
The third tent had two men in it and Susan had already handled one by the time anyone arrived. She had the second pinned at the back wall with one knee on his wand arm, and she was conducting what could charitably be called an interrogation.
He was talking. People always talked when Susan was asking.
Harry stood in the tent entrance and listened. The man was low-grade, no real connection to the inner circle, and most of what he knew was hearsay and half-heard camp conversation. But there was one thing he kept coming back to, both times unprompted, in the way genuine memory surfaced rather than invented detail. The house on the water. He said it twice. He’d heard it from someone who’d done a supply run, who’d described a northeast location, a long drive, old stone building near a canal, the kind of place that didn’t stand out from the road.
Stone walls. Still water. Northeast.
The same shape that had come out of Donaldson’s mind twenty feet away, from a man who hadn’t spoken to this one since before the operation began.
Harry looked at Daphne.
She was already looking at him and gave a short nod. He returned it.
“Enough,” Harry said.
Susan stepped back. She looked at Harry with a raised eyebrow.
He nodded.
She turned back and finished it. There was nothing performative about how Susan operated. She’d lost everyone she loved to the war before Fleur and Tonks found her, and she’d come through the grief with her capacity for action completely intact and her capacity for ceremony stripped entirely away. She did what the situation required, didn’t make it about herself, and moved on. Harry had appreciated that about her from the very beginning.
He’d been glad to see all three of them on that road, weeks ago. It had been a strange reunion given the circumstances.
“You’re alive,” Tonks had said.
“Yeah,” Harry had said. “So are you.”
“We heard you were dead. Or captured. Or gone abroad. The rumours weren’t consistent.” She’d held his gaze, and there were lines around her eyes that hadn’t been there the last time he’d seen her. Her hair was plain dark brown now, not the pink he remembered. She wasn’t choosing colour anymore. “I’m glad,” she’d said.
He’d been glad too. He hadn’t quite managed to say so in the moment. It had been there though.
Getting into the manor had taken longer than it should have, because Fleur was meticulous about identity verification. She had a full process. It involved questions only the right person would know, several anti-Polyjuice checks, and a final personal calculation before she committed to a conclusion.
“I believe you are Harry,” she’d said eventually.
“Cheers, Fleur.”
“It is not a compliment. It is a verification.”
“Yeah, I know. Still.”
Susan had done her version differently. She’d just watched the way he moved and listened to how he argued with Fleur about whether the verification was even necessary. “That’s him,” she’d told Fleur flatly. “Nobody argues exactly like that.” Harry had found this both accurate and oddly reassuring.
The reunion at the manor itself was harder to describe. Hermione had seen them come through the door and gone very still. Tonks had crossed the entrance hall and wrapped her arms around Hermione, the two young women holding each other tightly. Celeste had watched from the sitting room doorway, giving the moment its space.
The explanations had taken four hours and three rounds of tea that kept going cold while someone was in the middle of saying something important.
Fleur and Tonks had gone first, telling them about Bill and Remus. In return, Harry and Hermione told their version. The manor. Celeste, what she was, and what the bond meant in practice. Daphne, and the forest, and the weeks since. The Horcruxes. The one still inside Harry’s head. The ritual — three down, four to go — which Tonks had listened to with a mix of mirth and disbelief and Fleur had asked curious questions about.
When Tonks asked if it hurt, Harry shook his head. They both understood she wasn’t only asking about the ritual, but the Horcrux too.
Celeste had established herself with each of them at her own pace. With Tonks it was immediate and completely chaotic, the two of them capable of more dirty commentary in a single exchange than most people managed in an entire evening. Hermione had, on one occasion, briefly closed her eyes in exasperation when the two of them were being their crude selves.
With Fleur it was quieter and more careful, two beings who existed in the world in ways that weren’t entirely human, both knowing the specific nature of each other from the inside. Fleur didn’t usually discuss her Veela heritage comfortably. Celeste just treated it as a fact and moved on without making anything of it, which Fleur had clearly noticed and clearly appreciated in her own way.
Susan had taken the longest. She was careful by nature and more careful by circumstance, and what had eventually won her over was recognizing that Celeste’s directness wasn’t an act. Susan had no patience for false pretenses, and Celeste genuinely had none to give.
Daphne and Susan had found each other the way people did when they recognized something in someone else, that particular sense of having come through enormous loss and arriving on the other side somewhere clear and decided rather than destroyed. They didn’t need to explain themselves to each other. In the field they moved with a level of understanding that came partly from practicing together and partly from understanding each other’s priorities without words. Daphne’s careful control alongside Susan’s cold efficiency, and whoever was on the receiving end of it didn’t usually get a chance to comment on the combination.
Hermione was the last one back to the tree line after the camp was cleared. She always did a full perimeter circuit after operations, checking, confirming, making absolutely certain. When she returned her face was composed and her hands were steady. She didn’t meet anyone’s eyes right away. Nobody pushed her.
“Clear,” she said.
“Good,” Harry said. He’d been standing with Daphne at the tree line watching the campfire. The wind had died. It was cold and still and the stars were bright. “Let’s go through what we’ve got.”
“Donaldson mentioned the northeast territories specifically,” Daphne said. “Not as a general operational area. He was referencing a particular briefing.”
“I saw it,” Harry said. “Stone building, curved walls. A tower or an old mill. One window. Through it, still dark water moving very slowly. A canal or a weir, not an open river.” He paused. “Bellatrix was completely comfortable in the room. She’s been in that location long enough.”
“She might not still be there,” Tonks said. “She moves. But this is northeast. That’s consistent with the direction we’d been tracking.”
“The man in the third tent mentioned the house on the water,” Susan said. “Twice. Long way from London, northeast, old stone on a canal.”
“Three sources,” Harry said. “Donaldson’s memory, the man in the third tent, and the direction we’d been tracking independently.”
The group went quiet. The fire crackled across the clearing, burning itself down among the dead.
“That’s more than we’ve had,” Tonks said quietly.
“Yeah,” Harry agreed.
He turned to look at Daphne, only to find she was already looking at him. He gave her a short nod. She returned it.
He turned to Tonks and saw the expression on her face shift. “It’s coming,” Harry said.
“I know,” she said, her voice steady. “When?”
“Not tonight. When we know enough to move for sure. We do this right.”
Tonks held his gaze for a long moment, her jaw tight, and then nodded. Once.
“And when we do,” Daphne said from beside him, her voice quiet and certain, “we don’t leave her a way out.”
“No,” Harry said, reaching for her. “We don’t.”
xXx
They came back through the manor’s wards just after four in the morning. The entrance hall was warm and lit with amber lamplight. Celeste was sitting on the bottom stair.
She was wearing her usual attire, a small red dress that barely passed for a garment, her feet bare, her hair loose, and her chin resting in one hand as she watched them come through the door. Her eyes moved over each of them in turn and found them intact.
“All six,” she said. “In one piece.”
“Were you up all night?” Hermione said.
“Obviously.” Celeste stood fluidly. “I made a very reasonable case to myself for not being worried. It didn’t hold up.”
Not for the first time, Fleur’s jaw tightened at the effortless way in which she could look sensual. Being a veela herself, she had started taking it as a challenge, and try as she might, she could not help but feel that way.
“It never does,” Tonks said, unwinding her scarf.
Celeste crossed the hall toward Harry. Her hand came up to his jaw, then to the side of his neck, two fingers pressing briefly against his pulse. Her eyes closed for just a second, and she let out a breath. “You’re really alright.”
“We’re all alright,” Harry said.
“I can see that, Master.” Her fingers stayed at his jaw, caressing. “Come in. I want to hear it.”
They moved through to the sitting room. The fire was going and there were blankets on the chairs and tea on the low table without anyone having asked for it. Hermione accepted a mug with a nod. They had completely stopped being surprised by Celeste’s particular domestic instincts.
Harry took the armchair near the fire. Celeste, as usual, made herself comfortable across his lap without caring for propriety, her back against one arm of the chair, her legs over the other, and her hair falling loose as she settled against him with a small, satisfied sound. He put a hand on her inner thigh, stroking gently, the other on her upper arm. She moved it to her almost bare breast, adjusting his palm the way she wanted. Harry teased her nipple and smirked when she looked at him naughtily.
She was warm. After three hours in a frozen forest, that wasn’t an unpleasant combination.
Tonks was watching Celeste who noticed immediately. She always did. “Something to say, Nym?”
“First of all, absolutely not.” Tonks said, grinning. “Second of all, I’m just admiring the complete lack of self-consciousness. It’s almost inspiring.”
“Self-consciousness is a massive waste of time,” Celeste said. Her fingers found the hem of Harry’s sleeve and traced idle patterns there. “Even more so with my Master.” She tilted her head to look up at Harry. “What did you find?”
Harry ran through it. Patrol patterns. Tent layout. The encounter with Donaldson, what had come out of Donaldson’s mind. The stone building with curved walls. The window. The still dark water moving slowly beyond it. The northeast territories referenced in a specific briefing. The third tent’s corroboration. The phrase the house on the water, twice, from a man who’d had no contact with Donaldson since before the operation.
When Bellatrix’s name came into the account, Daphne’s hands tightened around her mug.
“Consistent,” she said when he finished. Her voice was even, but only barely. “Northeast, still water, stone construction. We had the rough direction before, nothing concrete enough to move on. Now three separate sources point at the same thing.” She paused. “She’ll have moved from that specific location. She always moves. But the people around her don’t change. Same close protection even when the building does.”
“So we identify the consistent personnel,” Tonks said. “Track them to wherever she’s gone. One step removed from her, but workable.”
“That’s the next step,” Harry agreed. “Find the network, find the pattern, wait for the right window.”
“And when the window opens?” Susan asked.
“We go through it.”
The fire settled, a log shifting. Celeste’s thumb traced a small arc on Harry’s wrist. He looked down at her. She was already looking up at him.
“Soon,” he said.
“You keep saying that.” She turned back to the fire. Her voice wasn’t complaining. “I’ve noticed it keeps being true, though. I’m choosing to find that reassuring rather than unsettling.”
“Good for you,” Harry said.
She stifled a chuckle and tilted her head back against his shoulder. He tightened his arm around her slightly.
“What’s actually left between here and moving on Bellatrix?” Hermione asked. She had her knees pulled up to her chest in the armchair across from him, mug in both hands. “We’ve got a confirmed general location and building type. We have the connection to her close protection detail as a next step. What else are we missing?”
“A specific address or enough environmental detail to narrow it to a single location,” Daphne said. “Right now we can describe the building but we can’t find it on a map. Northeast is a lot of ground.”
“The close protection angle might give us names,” Tonks said. “Names give us patterns. Patterns give us a location.”
“And we’ve got the water,” Susan said. “Old stone building on a canal in the northeast. That’s not nothing. We could cross-reference against properties with those features.”
“I already started a list,” Hermione said. “Before we left tonight, actually. There are about forty candidates in a rough northeast corridor that match stone construction and direct canal access. I can narrow that with the curved walls detail.” She paused. “Tower or mill narrows it further. There aren’t that many old stone mills on canals in the northeast that would serve as a functional base of operations.”
Harry looked at her. “How many?”
“Maybe a dozen, once I apply all the filters. Some will have too much road traffic, too many nearby properties. That takes it down further.” She reached across to the side table without looking and picked up the notepad she’d apparently already started. “I’m thinking twelve candidates absolute maximum, likely closer to six or seven once we account for practical considerations.”
“You started this before we left,” Harry said.
“I started it when we knew Donaldson was going to be at the camp,” Hermione said simply. “He’s northeast territory. Stands to reason he’d have something useful about northeast operations.” She shrugged. “I wanted to be ready.”
Tonks stared at her. “You are both deeply unsettling and extremely useful.”
“Thank you,” Hermione said with a chuckle.
“It wasn’t entirely a compliment.”
“I know.”
“So you had the research running before the operation, Donaldson’s memory gave you additional detail to filter against, and the third tent gave you corroboration. And between you now you can get this to six or seven probable locations,” Celeste remarked thoughtfully.
“Roughly,” Harry said.
“That’s not rough,” Celeste said. “That’s a week’s work, maybe less.” She was quiet for a moment. “How are you planning to narrow it down to one?”
“The close protection detail,” Daphne said. “If we can identify two or three of her known inner guard, track one of them to a specific location, we have it. They’re consistent. She’s not, but they are.”
“And we have sources for that?” Celeste asked.
“We will by the end of next week,” Harry said. “There are two snatchers from an eastern camp we hit last month who were willing to talk further in exchange for being left alive. One of them knew Bellatrix’s guard rotation from when he was briefly stationed near Malfoy Manor last year. I haven’t followed up because we didn’t have enough direction to make the information useful. Now we do.”
Celeste nodded. She’d turned fully toward him now, sitting sideways across his lap rather than reclining, which meant she was taking this seriously rather than just listening with one ear. “So the actual sequence is: Hermione narrows the location list to six or seven candidates, you get names from the snatcher sources, you cross-reference names against locations, you find the overlap.”
“And then we move,” Harry said.
“How long?”
“Two weeks, maybe less. Depending on how quickly the snatcher sources come through.”
Celeste was quiet for a moment. The fire popped. “Alright,” she said.
She didn’t ask again. That was one of the things Harry had come to rely on, when she understood the plan and the plan was sound, Celeste didn’t circle back. She sat with it and moved on. What she did instead was look at Harry with the honest expression, the one that lived below everything else. The one that was genuinely concerned with whether he came back through the door.
“When you go,Master,” she said, “you take all six. You don’t go light on this one.”
“I know.”
“I’m saying it out loud anyway.”
“I know you are.”
She held his gaze for another moment, then turned back to the fire. Her thumb resumed its small arc on his wrist.
Susan had stopped pretending to look at the flames. When Harry met her eyes across the room, she held them without looking away, her face tired and somewhat grateful. She was still adjusting to the nature of what the manor was and what the people in it were to each other. She’d asked her questions when she had them and gotten direct answers. It had taken about a week, but she had come to an understanding about all of it. Never let it be said that Amelia Bones’s niece was not efficient.
“Today we rest,” Harry said to the room. “Tomorrow, we work. We move when we know enough to move with certainty. Not before.”
Susan gave one nod. That was enough.
“And when we do,” Fleur said from the corner, not asleep but her eyes nearly closed, “we don’t make mistakes.”
“No,” Harry said. “We don’t.”
People began to move. Tonks stood and stretched before she said something quiet to Fleur who nodded. Susan put her mug down and looked at Harry on her way out. “Tomorrow,” she said.
“Tomorrow,” he agreed.
She walked out.
Tonks paused in the doorway.
“For what it’s worth,” she said. She looked around the room, at Celeste settled against Harry, at Daphne in the corner, and at Hermione watching her from across the fire. Then she met Harry’s eyes. “All of this. What you’ve built here. What it’s become.” She paused. “I’m glad to be part of it.”
Harry held her gaze. “Me too.”
Tonks looked at Celeste once more. It was a look Harry recognized by now, acknowledgment and maybe a bit of warmth. Celeste gave her a thoroughly unrepentant smile. Tonks shook her head with a smirk and walked out.
Daphne was the last one remaining in the room other than Harry, Hermione, and Celeste. She’d been quiet for the last several minutes, doing the thing she did after operations where she ran through the whole thing again silently, examining every decision and outcome and filing it away. When she finally looked up, her expression was resolved. Steady.
He gave her a short nod. She returned it. Then she stood, set her mug on the table, and walked out without a word.
Hermione watched her go. “She’s been waiting for this longer than any of us,” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” Harry said.
Hermione was quiet a moment. “She’ll be okay. When it’s done.”
“I know.”
“I just wanted to say it.”
She stood, put her own mug down, and paused at the doorway. “Get some sleep. Both of you.” She looked at Celeste with a look that had long since moved past exasperation into fond recognition. “Some actual sleep.”
“Of course,” Celeste said, looking utterly innocent.
Hermione shook her head and walked out.
Celeste turned to look at Harry with a coy look on her face. Her fingers walked up his forearm in the absent way that was part habit and part just how she existed, the creature of contact and warmth and unsubtle physicality that she was by nature.
“She worries about you,” Celeste said.
“All of them do.”
“That’s different. When Hermione worries about you it’s specific. She’s thinking about multiple things at once.” Celeste’s hand stilled on his arm. “She’s been like this since before we met.”
Harry didn’t answer. He didn’t need to.
“You know she’ll be fine,” Celeste said. “Tonight. What she couldn’t do. She knows what she is and she knows what she’s not and she doesn’t lie to herself about either. That’s not weakness. That’s just… being honest.”
“I know,” Harry said.
“You worry about her anyway.”
“Same way she worries about me.”
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly like that.”
She resettled herself, her head against his shoulder and her bare feet swinging idly off the arm of the chair. “Two weeks,” she said.
“Maybe less.”
“Two weeks,” she said again, as if fixing it in place. “And then it’s Bellatrix’s turn.”
Harry kept his gaze directed at the fire.
“Yeah,” he said. “Then it’s her turn.”