The girls’ bathroom on the second floor smelled exactly as Harry remembered it. The sinks were spotted with rust stains and the mirrors were fogged at the edges. One of the taps dripped slowly, irritatingly, but continuously.
Daphne walked in, looked around, and stopped dead.
“This,” she said, “is where it starts.”
“Yes,” Harry confirmed.
“An actual girls’ bathroom.”
“Is there a problem with that?”
Daphne turned to look at him fully. “Harry. You’re a boy.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“You opened the Chamber of Secrets for the first time from inside a girls’ bathroom.”
“I didn’t really choose the location.”
“It’s Hogwarts,” Gabrielle said. She had long since accepted strange things as part of the package when it came to the castle. “Magical school, thousand-year-old castle. The plumbing alone is probably sentient.”
Daphne was still surveying the bathroom. Her gaze drifted over the cracked tiles, the peeling paint, and the general atmosphere of a bathroom that had probably been dreary when the castle was built and had committed to the aesthetic ever since.
“It’s just very... It’s not exactly what you’d imagine for a secret lair. You’d think Slytherin could have done better. Even the prefects’ bathroom has better fittings than this.”
“He probably didn’t have a lot of input on where the entrance ended up,” Harry said. “And Myrtle haunts this place now, which puts people off using it. That keeps it clear.”
Right on cue, a ghostly wailing echoed from somewhere near the far cubicle. Peeves would have been obnoxious. Myrtle was something more specific.
She rose up through the floor like bad news, translucent and miserable, her thick glasses magnifying eyes that were permanently red-rimmed. She spotted Harry and let out a piercing shriek of joy that made Gabrielle flinch.
“Harry Potter! You came back to visit me!”
“Hi, Myrtle.”
Myrtle descended toward him in a spiral, her robes billowing as though she were underwater. “I’ve been waiting and waiting. Nobody ever comes to see me, you know. Nobody cares that I’m here all alone, day after day, nothing to do but cry and remember how I died—“
“Who killed you?” Daphne asked with curiosity, genuinely wanting to hear. She had pulled out her wand and was taking quiet note of the room’s layout.
Myrtle turned to look at her as though noticing she existed for the first time. “I was murdered. By a pair of great yellow eyes in the U-bend.”
“The basilisk.”
“I didn’t know what it was at the time, obviously, I was just minding my own business crying in the bathroom and then I died.” She drifted closer to Daphne with a suspicious expression. “Who are you? Are you Harry’s girlfriend?”
“One of them,” Daphne said pleasantly.
Myrtle’s eyes cut back to Harry. “One of them.”
“It’s a long story,” Harry said.
Myrtle made a sound somewhere between a sniff and a wail. “Nobody tells me anything. I’m just a dead girl in a bathroom. I don’t matter.” She began ascending toward the ceiling, her wailing growing louder.
“We need to use the sink,” Harry said quickly. “The entrance. We won’t be long.”
Myrtle paused, hovering near a light fixture, her expression shifting into something coy. “I could come with you. Keep you company.”
“Better not,” Harry said. “It’s a bit cramped.”
“I wouldn’t take up much space,” she said hopefully. “I’m a ghost.”
“We’ll be fine on our own, but thanks.” He turned to the sinks before she could argue further.
Daphne appeared at his elbow. “She fancies you.”
“Yes.”
“She’s dead.”
“I know.”
“That’s— I don’t have a follow-up to that, actually.”
Harry crouched by the tap with the small snake engraved on its side, the same one he’d found three years ago half by accident. He hissed, a soft command in Parseltongue, and the tap glowed white before the sink dropped and twisted away into the floor, revealing the wide dark mouth of the pipe beneath.
They all looked down it. Cold air breathed up at them.
“That,” Daphne said, “is a pipe.”
“The way in,” Harry confirmed.
“You slide down it.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Harry.” She looked at him. “We are climbing into a drain.”
“Technically we’re sliding,” Gabrielle said. She had her wand already lit and was peering down with interest. “Did you slide down blind, first time?”
“More or less.”
“Brave,” she said. “Or mad.”
“Both, probably.” Harry went first, pushing off and letting the pipe take him. The descent was fast, darkness rushing past until the pipe curved and deposited him onto the damp stone floor below with a thud. Gabrielle followed seconds later, and then Daphne, who landed and immediately produced a nonverbal Lumos so powerful it lit the tunnel in both directions.
“Right,” Daphne said, taking in the tunnel: the long stone passage, the ancient carved serpents lining the walls, the half-crumbled brick columns, and the collection of bones and skeletons covering the floor. “Sooo... this is under the castle. Charming.”
“Deep under,” Harry confirmed. “Come on.”
They walked single file toward the great metal door at the end, their wandlight making the carved snakes writhe and shimmer. Everything was exactly as Harry remembered, which was to say it looked exactly like a sewer designed by someone who took their mythology very seriously. Ancient, cold, and perpetually damp.
Daphne moved close to one wall and examined the serpents running its length, tracing a finger just above the stonework. “These are exceptional,” she said. “The craftsmanship. They’re engraved so deep that years of water and damp haven’t touched them. This was built to last forever.”
“Everything Slytherin did was built to last forever,” Harry said. “Including his pet, apparently.”
“We’ll get to that.” She straightened. “The political implications alone. Hogwarts has a secret second structure underneath it, constructed by a Founder, accessible only to his heirs. Can you imagine what the Wizengamot would do if this ever came out? That the Chamber is real?”
“We sort of blew half of it up back in second year,” Harry said, “so some of the structure’s already compromised.”
“He blew up part of a Founder’s secret chamber,” Daphne said to Gabrielle.
“I know,” Gabrielle replied mirthfully. “I’ve heard the account.”
Harry stopped at the main door. The serpents wrapped around its surface were tarnished with time and moisture but perfectly intact. He hissed at it and the columns moved, grinding back against the stone, and the door split open.
The Chamber itself opened before them.
Daphne walked in and stopped after three steps.
It was enormous. The ceiling rose higher than could be accounted for by the floors above, lost somewhere in darkness that their wands couldn’t reach. A long reflecting pool ran the center of the floor, still and black, its surface broken only by the slow drip of water from somewhere overhead. Pillars of carved stone flanked the pool on both sides, each one wound with serpents that climbed toward the ceiling in spiraling coils. At the far end, looming and magnificent, was the great face of Salazar Slytherin himself, carved directly into the stone wall, mouth hanging open in the maw that served as his final flourish of theatrical design.
It was all extremely impressive.
It was also, in the particular way of grand things left to ruin, somewhat melancholy. The pool was choked with algae. Green slime crept up the bases of the pillars. A faint smell of decay clung to everything, strong enough to be unpleasant and specific enough to have an obvious source.
The basilisk lay where Harry had left it three years ago. Enormous, the full length of the chamber, coiled slightly upon itself in death. Its scales had dulled from vivid green to a dusty grey-brown and its belly had begun to bloat and then collapse again as whatever decomposition processes applied to magical serpents had run their course. It was still recognizable as a snake, and it was still the biggest thing Harry had ever seen, but it had lost whatever terrible life had animated it. Now it was just ancient dead weight rotting in a drainpipe.
“That’s the basilisk,” Gabrielle said quietly.
“What’s left of it.”
Daphne had walked the full perimeter of the pool, studying the carved pillars, the serpents, the walls. Her face was composed but her eyes were working hard, cataloguing everything. “This is the most significant magical discovery of the last century,” she said, not loudly. “An intact sub-structure built by Salazar Slytherin. The wards on this place alone would be worth a decade of study.”
“You can come back and study it after Voldemort’s dead,” Harry said. “Tonight we’re looking for a Horcrux.”
“I know.” She turned to face the length of the chamber. “Have you looked properly before?”
“Last time I was here I was busy fighting for my life. I wasn’t exactly thorough.”
“Then let’s be thorough now.” She moved along the walls, lighting every surface, running her wand along the carved stone in patterns that Harry recognized as advanced detection spellwork from Dumbledore’s tomes. He watched her work for a moment before moving to the opposite wall to do the same.
Gabrielle took the center, walking the length of the pool slowly, checking the pillars.
Twenty minutes later, they had established that the Chamber, minus the basilisk’s lair behind that famous open maw, was essentially empty. There was nothing hidden in the walls, nothing under the pool, nothing concealed in the pillars. Just stone and water and rot.
“It’s a glorified sewer,” Harry said.
“A glorified sewer with a basilisk and a massive stone monument to the founder’s ego,” Daphne corrected, studying the great carved face at the far end. “He put his own face in here. Not his house crest, not a serpent, not anything symbolic. His face.” She tilted her head. “I am forced to conclude Salazar Slytherin was absolutely insufferable.”
“Most Dark Lords are,” Gabrielle observed.
“He wasn’t technically a Dark Lord.”
“He was the template.”
Harry had moved to stand before the open maw, looking into the darkness beyond the great stone mouth. His wandlight fell a few metres in and then gave up against the dark. “There’s a chamber in here. Behind the statue’s mouth. The basilisk lived in there.”
Daphne came to stand beside him. They both looked into it for a moment.
“A Horcrux wouldn’t be in there,” Harry said. “Basilisk venom destroys Horcruxes. We saw what Riddle’s diary looked like after a fang went through it. Keeping a Horcrux in the basilisk’s bedroom would be insane. The thing could have accidentally bitten it and destroyed it without even knowing.”
“Agreed,” Daphne said. She paused. “We should still look, though.”
Harry looked at her. “Why?”
“Because a space that only Parseltongues can access and that nobody in their right mind would walk into is also a brilliant place to stash valuables. Voldemort might not have kept a Horcrux in there, but Slytherin might have kept other things. Artifacts. Knowledge. Things sitting there undisturbed for a thousand years.” She smiled at him slightly. “Also I want to see what’s in there. Obviously.”
“Of course you do.”
“One can hope for a Horcrux,” she added. “Even if the logic argues against it.”
Harry looked back into the darkness, then shrugged. He turned to the stone mouth and hissed, the command slipping into the air, and with a grinding sound the stone jaws ground open another metre, the passage widening enough to walk through comfortably.
The smell hit them immediately and completely, a wall of rot and musk and something old enough that it had become its own category of unpleasant. Gabrielle made a small noise. Daphne’s jaw set.
“Right,” Harry said. “Forward.”
The passage opened after ten metres into a natural cave enlarged by intention, the ceiling rough-hewn and the floor deeply worn where the basilisk had moved over centuries. The walls were scorched in places where some long-ago medieval variation of the creature’s heat had left its mark. Accumulated debris lay against the walls in drifts: shed skin, great translucent sheets of it like collapsed marquees, some of them centuries old and crumbling at a touch. Bones, too, from prey brought here over a millennium. The smell was something to exist inside rather than simply detect.
Gabrielle cast a Bubble-Head Charm with impressive speed. Daphne followed. Harry did the same and felt immediate relief.
“This is disgusting,” Gabrielle stated, looking at the shed skins.
“It’s a thousand years of living space,” Harry said. “Roughly.”
“I’m going to need to burn these robes after.”
“The castle laundry can manage,” Daphne said, but she was already moving, her wand lit and sweeping through detection patterns. Harry moved along the opposite wall.
They searched for fifteen minutes. The shed skins, the bones, the accumulated muck of a millennium. Harry shifted a collapsed section of scales the size of a dining table and found only stone underneath. Gabrielle uncovered a collection of bones that had probably been something quite large before the basilisk acquired it and noted them with detached interest, having long since decided to simply accept things as they were.
Harry nudged a particularly foul pile of debris with his boot and looked at Daphne. “Still think there’s something valuable in here?”
She didn’t answer him. She was standing very still at the far end of the cave, her wand raised and her light fixed on a specific point in the wall.
“Harry.”
Her voice was different. He crossed the cave to her quickly.
There it was. Tucked into a deep natural alcove in the back wall, behind a drift of shed skin so old it was barely distinguishable from dust, something was there. Harry’s own Lumos found it a second later. Something that was not stone, not bone, not anything that belonged to the basilisk.
They cleared the debris together, vanishing the worst of it. The shed skin came away in pieces, crumbling as they moved it. Behind it, in the alcove, something sat on a naturally raised shelf of stone.
It was large. Roughly oval, coming to a softened point at one end. Its surface had a texture like smooth dark leather, though when Harry’s wandlight caught it at a certain angle it showed faint iridescence, greens and blues that moved like oil on water. It was, without any possible alternative explanation, an egg.
They both stared at it.
“That,” Daphne said, after a moment, “is a basilisk egg.”
“Yes,” Harry agreed.
“A viable one, by the look of it.” She moved her wand slowly across it, reading whatever her diagnostic spells were telling her. “The incubation temperature in here, the enchantments on this cave, the isolation. It’s been kept perfectly. It could be decades old and it would still be...” She trailed off.
“Viable,” Harry finished.
They stood in silence. The egg sat on its shelf, enormous and iridescent and utterly indifferent to the implications it carried.
Harry thought about what it would mean to someone who wanted it. A Parselmouth could hatch it and control it from birth, raise something that would follow commands and kill with a glance. He could name a dozen people who would consider that a gift rather than a catastrophe. He thought about what Voldemort had done with the last one. He thought about the attacks and the girl who had nearly died and the boy on the wrong end of a sword who had barely saved her. He thought about the basilisk lying dead out in the Chamber, a thing that had once been magnificent and had been turned into a weapon and was now just a very large decomposing problem.
He thought about leaving this egg here and coming back in six years to find that something had gone wrong in the meantime.
He looked at Daphne. She was already looking at him. Her expression said exactly what his was saying.
“We can’t leave it,” he said.
“No.”
“And we can’t let anyone else know about it. The moment word gets out that there’s a viable basilisk egg under Hogwarts, every dark witch and wizard in Britain will want it.”
“I know.”
“It has to be destroyed.”
Daphne looked at the egg for a long moment. She was a Slytherin who had grown up reading about Salazar’s legacy, who had just walked through the most significant piece of Founder history that existed anywhere in the world. Harry knew what that cost her to set aside.
She looked up at him and nodded once.
He held her gaze for a moment before he looked at the egg. They both knew what needed to be done.
XXXXX
Gabrielle had been sitting at the table in the Room of Requirement for about three minutes now, and she’d been watching the door since then, having come back earlier than the other two. When it finally opened and Harry and Daphne came in, she looked at their faces, and then at the cloth-wrapped bundle Harry was carrying. He set it carefully on the table between them.
“So this is it,” she said.
“This is it,” Harry confirmed.
Gabrielle looked at the bundle. It was silk, Harry’s robes repurposed quickly and wrapped around something rigid, irregular, and from the careful way Harry had put it down, probably fragile. Or dangerous. Or both.
She reached for the corner of the silk. Harry nodded. She pulled it back slowly.
For a moment she simply looked.
They were enormous, the fangs, longer than her forearm and curved to a vicious point, the enamel surface yellowed but intact. Three of them lay on the silk, the largest the size of a small dagger. The hollow channel through which the venom had been delivered was still visible, a dark groove running the full length.
Basilisk fangs.
“From the dead one,” Daphne said, sitting down. “We took three. The venom is still potent in them—I ran the diagnostic. Basilisk venom retains its properties for up to fifty years in the fang, sometimes longer if the conditions are right, and it’s been cold and dark down there.”
Gabrielle was already nodding, understanding moving across her face. “For the Horcruxes.”
“Exactly,” Harry said. “We don’t always have the Sword of Gryffindor. We can’t carry it around. But these—“ He looked at the fangs on the table. “These we can use. We find another Horcrux, we don’t have to go running to Dumbledore for the sword.”
“That’s brilliant,” Gabrielle said. She looked at Daphne. “This was your idea.”
“It was obvious once we were down there,” Daphne said. “The basilisk’s been dead for three years and there are dozens of fangs. It would have been wasteful not to.”
Gabrielle smiled slightly, then let it fade. “And what about...”
“The basilisk egg,” Harry said.
“A viable basilisk egg. Under the school. I still can’t believe it.”
“We did what needed to be done,” Harry said, and Gabrielle held his gaze for a moment. Then she looked at Daphne who said nothing, which was enough in itself.
Gabrielle’s lips pursed and she nodded once, slowly, before she looked back at the basilisk fangs on the table.
Nobody said anything else about it.
“Three fangs,” Gabrielle said finally, returning to what was in front of them. She reached out and touched the silk beside one, not the fang itself, just the fabric. “That’s three Horcruxes we can destroy ourselves, without relying on the sword.”
“We’ll need to be careful how we carry them,” Daphne said. “The venom can be absorbed through skin. I’ll put protective stasis on the storage case. And nobody touches the exposed tips under any circumstances.”
“Right.” Harry rewrapped the silk carefully over the fangs. “We tell Dumbledore about the fangs. And that’s all.”
“Agreed,” said both girls simultaneously.
XXXXX
The OWLs arrived at the end of May like a natural disaster that had been clearly visible on the horizon for months and still managed to feel surprising. Every fifth year in the castle underwent some version of the same transformation in the weeks preceding them: shorter on sleep, longer on caffeine, prone to reviewing notes in the middle of meals and rehearsing spells under their breath at odd hours.
Harry sat his exams with efficiency. He had been doing actual combat magic for most of the year and found the theoretical portions far less alarming than his classmates did. Transfiguration Theory was straightforward. Potions practical was careful work. He managed Snape’s replacement without incident, the Potions examiner being a Ministry witch who had no particular views on Harry Potter’s father and simply watched him brew with clinical attention. Defense Against the Dark Arts, both written and practical, was almost insulting in its simplicity given what he’d been doing in the Room of Requirement and on the battlefield, which he supposed was the point.
Daphne moved through her OWLs with focused calm. She had been preparing her entire life for exactly this kind of assessment, and it showed. She sat next to Harry for the ones they shared and he noticed she finished each written component with twenty minutes to spare and spent the remainder making small, precise corrections to answers she had already gotten right. He asked her once if that was useful and she said it depended on the examiner’s grading methodology, which was not the answer he’d been expecting.
Neville had a different experience. He came out of the Herbology practical looking as though someone had lifted a building off him and set it down three feet to his left. Tracey met him outside and he said, slightly dazed, that he thought he’d done all right, and Tracey said she knew he had, and he stood there blinking in the spring sunshine as though re-learning the concept of things going well.
The practical Defense examination had an interesting moment when Harry cast a Shield Charm against the examiner’s test curse and the examiner, an elderly wizard named Tofty, took a small step backward and made a note that seemed to involve several exclamation marks.
“Mr. Potter,” Tofty had said, recovering. “That was... thoroughly done.”
They emerged from the last exam, Charms, on a Thursday afternoon to find sunlight and there was a sense of relief over everyone, as if they’d discharged an obligation entirely.
Neville was outside already, talking to Tracey, the tension finally out of him. Susan was there too, with Hannah, both looking cautiously optimistic. Blaise stood slightly apart, watching Katie tell some story to Angelina and Alicia with her hands, his expression fond in a way that still looked new on him.
Fred and George appeared around the corner of the castle, looking entirely too cheerful for people who had just sat their NEWTs, which meant either they’d done brilliantly or had simply stopped worrying about it somewhere around the Transfiguration practical and hadn’t started again.
“We’re done,” Fred announced.
“Exams, school obligations, academic misery,” George added. “Done.”
They found a spot on the grounds near the lake. Someone conjured a cooler of butterbeer that appeared to have been pre-planned. Someone else spread blankets on the grass.
“Six weeks,” Neville said, looking up at the sky. “Summer holiday. No Umbridge, no Ministry interference, no—“
“She’s gone,” Tracey reminded him. “Didn’t last long.”
“I know. It still bears repeating.” He paused. “No exams.”
“Your gran will have you practicing potions within a fortnight,” Susan said.
“Probably. But at least I’ll be doing it at home. Where there are also biscuits.” He accepted a butterbeer from Harry. “What’s everyone doing for the summer?”
“France,” Gabrielle said. “My parents expect me back. Though I imagine it won’t be entirely restful, given everything.”
“Greengrass Manor,” Daphne said. “My father’s been managing a lot of the political work from there. I imagine there will be meetings.” She glanced at Harry. “And visits.”
“Grimmauld Place,” Harry said. “Sirius has been making improvements. Apparently that means he’s had the house-elf repaint three rooms and is threatening to tackle the library.”
“Kreacher will have opinions about that,” Daphne said.
“Kreacher has opinions about everything. That’s never stopped Sirius.”
Susan looked over at Harry from across the blanket. “About Sirius and my aunt...”
“If you mean the wedding,” Harry said, “then yes. They finally decided on the date.”
“Indeed,” Susan said. “But I just— I wanted to know what you thought about it. Since you know them both, and since you’re, well. You’re sort of in the middle of all of it.”
Harry considered this. He thought about Sirius, who had spent twelve years in Azkaban and two years after that still half-fugitive in his own ancestral house, and who had slowly, carefully rebuilt himself into someone who could stand in a Wizengamot chamber and argue policy without the weight of wrongful imprisonment crushing everything else. He thought about Amelia, who ran the Ministry of Magic with Voldemort on one side and the traditionalist faction on the other and an assassination attempt already behind her, who kept going in the particular way of people who cannot afford to stop.
He thought about them together. People damaged by different things who had found, unexpectedly, something worth rebuilding for.
“I think it’s good,” he said. “For both of them. Sirius has been through a lot, and he’s been alone for a long time now. Not literally alone, but—“ He paused. “He needed something to be about. Someone to be about. And Amelia needed someone who wasn’t just an ally. She has plenty of those.”
Susan nodded slowly, processing his words.
“And for us,” Harry continued, “it’s also good in purely practical terms. Sirius anchors House Black’s formal support to the Ministry. That was already there in practice, but this makes it binding in ways the traditionalists can’t easily pick apart.”
“The traditionalist faction is furious,” Blaise said. He was lying back on the grass, looking at the sky. “Flint’s lot. The marriage makes Amelia harder to move against politically. She was already difficult. Now she’s allied to one of the oldest houses in Britain.”
“That’s by design,” Daphne said. “They’ve timed it well. The announcement came right after the Wizengamot session where Flint tried to make noise about Hogsmeade, again. It resets the narrative.”
“Politics is tiring,” Fred observed.
“Politics is the thing keeping us all alive at the moment,” Daphne replied. “Amelia holds the Ministry, the Ministry coordinates the Aurors, the Aurors respond to Death Eater attacks. If Flint’s faction manages to destabilize her position, that entire chain weakens. So yes, it’s tiring, and it also matters enormously.”
“She’s right,” Hannah said. “I don’t love thinking about it that way, but she is.”
“My aunt’s very capable,” Susan said. “I’m not worried about her handling the traditionalists. I’m just—“ She paused, pressing her lips together. “It’s strange, thinking of her getting married. She’s been doing everything alone for so long.”
Harry caught something in her voice. “It’s good, Susan. Really. He makes her laugh. You don’t see it much because they’re usually in rooms full of people being careful, but when it’s just them, he makes her laugh.”
Susan looked at him for a moment, and something in her expression eased. “That’s actually the best thing you could have said.”
The afternoon drifted on. The lake was still and brilliant. Someone had brought a wireless from somewhere inside the castle, and it was playing something Muggle-adjacent that the twins declared acceptable and Tracey declared unfortunate and everyone ignored. Neville and Tracey argued gently about the summer’s likely Quidditch fixtures. Katie showed Gabrielle something on a scroll she’d been corresponding about with someone in France. The conversation broke into fragments and reformed again.
Blaise sat up after a while. He’d been quiet, and it wasn’t the comfortable quiet of someone at ease. It was the quiet of someone who had been deciding whether to say something and had finally concluded that not saying it was worse.
“There’s something I want to put to everyone,” he said.
The conversations nearest to him slowed and stopped. He had their attention without having asked for it, which was a skill in itself.
“I’ve been getting letters from home,” he said. “My mother has contacts across most of wizarding society. She socializes in places that are somewhat difficult to categorize.”
“Meaning she knows Death Eaters,” Daphne said.
“She knows people who know Death Eaters. Among other people.” He looked at his hands briefly. “There have been disappearances. Not just the ones the Daily Prophet has been covering, the ones they’re attributing to the Death Eaters. Those are targeted. You can usually trace a logic to them even if the logic is Dark Lord political housekeeping. What my mother’s hearing about are different. People vanishing without the usual pattern. No Dark Mark above their houses, no Ministry reports of suspected Death Eater activity, no bodies turning up anywhere.”
The blankets went quiet. Even Neville, who had been half asleep, opened his eyes.
“What kind of people?” Harry asked.
“That’s the odd part,” Blaise said. “Mixed. Half-bloods, some Muggle-borns, a few blood purists who had apparently fallen out with the wrong people in their own circles. No obvious connection between them. Different parts of the country. Different social backgrounds. Different ages. Nothing linking them except that they’ve gone.” He looked around at the group. “Four that my mother knows of personally. She thinks there are more that she hasn’t heard about yet.”
“Have you told Dumbledore?” Harry asked.
“I’m telling you. I thought you’d know how to pass it on through the right channels without making it a formal report that gets buried in some Ministry inbox.”
“I’ll talk to him tonight,” Harry said.
Neville was frowning at the lake. “Death Eaters acting without Voldemort’s orders? Or something else entirely?”
“Could be rogue elements,” Daphne said, though she didn’t sound convinced even as she said it. “Or a faction acting independently of the main Death Eater structure. That’s happened before historically.”
“It doesn’t feel like that,” Blaise said. “Rogue Death Eaters still leave traces. They’re not exactly subtle as a rule. This is more like—“ He paused, choosing the word. “Precision. Someone doing very specific work and leaving nothing behind them. That’s either exceptionally well-organized, or it’s something with different priorities than the usual Death Eater approach.”
“Different priorities,” Gabrielle said slowly. “Meaning they’re not trying to terrorize anyone. They just want the people.”
“That’s what it looks like,” Blaise confirmed.
Nobody had a quick answer to that. The wireless continued playing something cheerful and entirely at odds with the mood that had settled over the group.
XXXXX
The Hogwarts Express left, which felt different from every other year Harry could remember because it was earlier than usual and also because there was the specific weight of everything that had happened in the year pressing on the carriage. He sat with Daphne and Gabrielle, Neville and Tracey across from them, and the compartment door kept sliding open to admit people for five minutes of conversation before they moved on to see someone else.
Blaise stopped in for a while and discussed the political situation with detached calm, having been raised to understand that politics was simply another kind of weather: you didn’t enjoy it particularly, but you learned to navigate it. The twins looked in and declared that they were starting a business and wanted Harry’s endorsement, which he gave in exchange for two complimentary cloaks and the twins’ agreement to stop putting extendable ears near his dormitory window. Fred said the last condition was unexpectedly specific. Harry said it was surprisingly necessary. The twins left laughing.
Susan came to say goodbye, since she was riding in a different carriage with her Hufflepuff classmates for most of the journey. She hugged Harry briefly and looked at Daphne for a moment before hugging her too, which seemed to surprise Daphne slightly and please her more than she let on.
Hannah waved from the corridor. Ernie and Zacharias were visible behind her, doing whatever Hufflepuff boys did on long train journeys.
Gradually the compartment settled. Neville dozed off against Tracey’s shoulder. Tracey read. Harry had a book that he wasn’t really reading, the pages turning at intervals that suggested attention but concealed the fact that his mind was moving somewhere quite different.
Daphne sat beside him with her shoulder against his, looking out the window as the countryside opened up outside. She wasn’t reading either. The landscape unrolled past them, green and gold and ordinary, the kind of countryside that looked like nothing in particular was happening anywhere in it.
Gabrielle was watching the glass too.
“Strange year,” Daphne said.
“All the years are strange,” Harry said.
“This one was particularly. We destroyed Horcruxes. There was a battle at Hogsmeade. The Ministry almost killed its own Minister. And we found—“ She stopped. “We found several things.”
He knew what she meant by that. The egg. The fangs wrapped in silk now at the bottom of his trunk.
“Three Horcruxes left,” he said. “Plus Nagini.”
“The cup,” Gabrielle said from across the compartment, still looking at the window. “Something of Slytherin’s, maybe. And Nagini. If Dumbledore’s right about the total.”
“He usually is,” Daphne said, not quite admiring and not quite resigned.
Harry thought about the disappeared people Blaise had mentioned. No pattern, no bodies, no Dark Marks. Something careful and invisible moving through wizarding Britain.
The train ran south, the hills on either side receding to expose a flat plain scattered with farms and small towns and the kind of normal life that existed in complete indifference to the war being conducted in parallel with it. A Muggle town slid past the window, red brick and television aerials and a church, all of it entirely oblivious.
“Whatever’s coming,” Harry said, “we’ll be ready.”
Neither girl answered that directly.
Gabrielle looked at the countryside and Daphne looked at the countryside, and the train carried them south, and outside the window the sky was very clear and very blue and said nothing at all about the storm was ahead.
To be continued...