Chapter 160: The Cost of Escape

 

Kreacher slept for eighteen hours.

Madam Pomfrey closed the wound in his shoulder, removed the dark residue around it, and ordered three days without Apparition. Kreacher protested until Sirius threatened to bind him to the sofa with his own clean sheets.

Edward's burns required less magic and more patience. Two fingers remained bandaged. Bruises darkened across his ribs where the blast had thrown him. Every sudden noise returned him to the clearing for half a breath.

The ruined Heart-Flame Crest went to Burke under an Auror seal. Edward sent the full field account with it and asked three questions: whether every crystal fragment had remained inside the pouch, whether the dark sap had reached the recognition bead, and whether the intercepted yellow spell had left a readable trace.

Burke answered two days later.

All crystal fragments were contained. The sap destroyed the outer setting after severing the trigger path. No usable trace of the yellow spell remained.

His final sentence was underlined.

Containment succeeded. The object did not make the encounter safe.

Edward copied it onto the first page of the register.

Remus reviewed the forest decisions with him in the ballroom. They used chairs for trees, rope for the moving wall, and a folded blanket for the stone platform. The exercise felt childish until Edward realized how many choices he had misremembered as inevitable.

Their first decision had been sound: Edward and Kreacher tried to retreat. Approaching Bertha with an extraction plan was defensible, though far more dangerous than Edward had admitted to himself afterward. His spell before the adults broke through had freed one of Bertha's arms and might have prevented an earlier curse, but it had also exposed their position.

Once Bertha died, retreating toward help had again been the right choice. Edward had weakened that choice by repeatedly turning to cast when Kreacher could have shortened their escape. Each delay gave the pursuit another chance to close, and one of those delays helped put Kreacher within reach of the spell that wounded him.

"I was trying to hold them back," Edward said.

"You were trying to make the pursuit feel like a fight you could win," Remus replied.

The distinction settled heavily.

They examined the moment Peter cast the Killing Curse. Edward had conjured solid wood into its path. The curse destroyed the wood rather than touching him.

"The Crest barrier was already gone," Remus said. "Do not let anyone conclude it stopped that curse."

"It could not."

"Write it."

Edward added the warning to every copy of the report.

The hardest moment was not a spell. It was the choice after Bertha stopped moving. Edward had wanted to attack Peter, and the wish had felt righteous. Kreacher's hand on his sleeve had kept the wish from becoming action.

"Anger told me I could still change the result," Edward said.

Remus sat opposite him. "Anger often arrives after helplessness because it feels more useful."

A pulse of heat moved beneath Edward's ribs. It carried the familiar edge he called Ash, the partition of instinct, fear, and anger that his own magic had shaped around survival. Since the inquiry after Fenrir's death, he no longer treated it as a stranger living inside him.

Ash offered no words. The impulse was simpler: strike before loss could happen again.

Edward let the heat rise without feeding it. "That part of me wanted Peter dead."

"Wanting is not casting."

"It has cast before."

"Then you build space between the impulse and your hand. Not by pretending the impulse belongs to someone else."

They practised that space. Remus startled him, pressed him with rapid questions, and sent padded objects across his peripheral vision. Edward had to name what he saw before moving his wand.

On the fifth attempt, heat flashed along his arm. He lowered the wand, breathed, and identified the harmless object.

A red cushion.

Nothing burned.

Sirius underwent his own review with McGonagall. He emerged from the drawing room irritated and admitted that he had followed a false cry beyond the agreed line before placing the waymark.

"I thought it was Bertha," he said.

"It may have copied her voice."

"I know that now."

They did not compete over whose mistake had been more dangerous. Both signed the revised family rules: no solo investigation of a suspected Voldemort site, no pursuit beyond a fixed extraction line, and no use of a family bond without stating who was expected to follow it.

Kreacher added a condition in cramped handwriting. No master could order a house-elf into an unknown ward without an agreed return command.

Sirius signed that too.

Amelia Bones's search order for Peter arrived before the end of the week. The unknown servant remained unnamed. Fudge had removed a sentence that referred directly to Voldemort, but Bones attached a classified warning describing a powerful dark wizard in a rudimentary body.

Dumbledore did not rely on the Ministry notice. He arranged guarded communication with the Weasleys, warned Harry in terms that would not expose the Horcrux secret, and asked Sirius to remain at Grimmauld Place until his ankle healed.

Harry received facts he could use: Peter was alive, Voldemort had gained a weak body, and unfamiliar requests should be verified through a known adult. He did not receive the cave's location or the nature of the locket. Dumbledore promised that the limits of the warning would be explained to him later rather than disguised as complete trust.

Edward wrote to Harry separately. He described no heroics and gave no order. He apologized that Peter had escaped again and included the same emergency contacts. Harry's reply contained one line: Stop apologizing for Peter's choices.

Edward placed the line beside Remus's review notes.

Sirius hated the confinement. He obeyed.

The World Cup invitation from the Malfoys arrived during this uneasy quiet. Lucius offered seats in the family box and assured Sirius that Ministry security would be extensive.

"That assurance makes me less comfortable," Sirius said.

Edward wanted to refuse. Large crowds, loose camps, and international travel now looked like collections of things he could not control. Avoiding every public place would also surrender ordinary life to fear.

They set conditions. Edward would travel with the Malfoys but keep his own Portkey to a prearranged safe location. He would not carry an experimental artifact. Sirius would know the campsite and expected return time. If violence began, Edward would leave rather than investigate.

Draco accepted the rules with only one complaint about the separate Portkey being unfashionable.

The evening before departure, Edward sat with Kreacher in the kitchen. The house-elf could move his shoulder again but still wore a bandage.

"Bertha fought," Edward said. "She kicked the cauldron."

"Kreacher remembers."

"I want that in the final statement. Not only what was done to her."

Kreacher nodded.

They wrote the sentence together.

Bertha Jorkins resisted her captors until the moment of her death and created the opening that allowed witnesses to preserve evidence of the ritual.

It did not save her. It kept her from becoming only a victim in their account.

Edward closed the register. The cost of Albania could not be balanced against what they had learned. Sirius and Kreacher were alive. Bertha was not. Voldemort had a body. Peter had escaped. The unknown servant remained free.

Those facts required preparation, not a promise of vengeance.

The final training condition was simple: no new exercise began while either Edward or Kreacher concealed pain. Readiness could not be measured by how convincingly they ignored injury.