Chapter 186: What the Prophet Printed

 

The Slytherin common room was almost empty when he reached it, since most of the house was still somewhere out under the sky, living off the last of the afternoon and telling one another what they had seen.

The black dog was waiting at the entrance, and it came to him the moment he stepped through, tail going, pushing its head into his palm with its amber eyes fixed steadily on his face.

Edward sat down on the low sofa beside the fire and put his hand into the dog's fur, and the warmth of it travelled up through his fingers and reached something that had been clenched tight since the arena.

He stayed like that with his eyes shut for a long while before he spoke, and when he did his voice was very low, carrying a weight he had not let anybody hear all day.

"Uncle Sirius, since this tournament began I have not been able to shake the feeling that something is watching me." His hand went still in the fur. "It is not the way Skeeter watches, which is at least honest about itself. This is colder and a great deal more patient, like something coiled up in the dark that has already decided, and is only waiting on the hour."

The dog's body went rigid under his hand. Then the shape came apart into silver light and Sirius was sitting on the arm of the sofa, his hair as disordered as ever and his eyes not remotely so.

Sirius did not answer straight away, and when he did his voice had dropped to match. "I have felt it myself. On the night patrols this past week there have been magical fluctuations coming off the Forbidden Forest, and they come and go without any rhythm I can name. It has the pattern of somebody testing the castle's defences a very little at a time, and being extremely careful about not being caught doing it."

He put a hand on Edward's shoulder and left it there.

"You are the centre of this tournament now, and yesterday you showed the entire school precisely what you can do, which reaches ears we would both rather it did not. His people have always wanted magic like yours, and where they cannot take it they will settle for the chaos that comes of trying."

"So from tonight I stay close to you, days and nights alike." His grip tightened a fraction. "And you do not go anywhere alone, not once, not for five minutes, and above all not after dark. Keep Harry with you, or keep your own house around you. Do not hand anybody the opening they are waiting for."

Edward nodded, and unease flickered through his eyes while the flame pattern came up unbidden at his fingers, thin and gold, the magic still unsettled somewhere beneath his skin.

"I understand, and I will. It is the waiting that wears on me more than the danger does, knowing something is out there and having no way of knowing which night it decides to move."

"Then set that part down, because it is not yours to carry." Sirius's gaze did not shift. "I am here and Professor Dumbledore is here. Your work is the tournament and staying whole while you do it, and the rest of it belongs to us."

He stood, and added one more thing over his shoulder before the light took him.

"If you feel that gaze again, signal me. A single spark will do it. I will be with you before it has finished burning."

Edward made a low sound of agreement and let his head go back against the cushions, and the silver folded down into the dog again, which settled across his feet with its face turned toward the entrance and its amber eyes catching what little the fire threw.

By morning the sunlight had come back into the corridors in long gold bars, and most of his magic had come back along with it. He washed and dressed and turned his mind toward the golden egg while he walked, and he had barely reached the hall before he saw Draco coming the other way at speed, with Theodore and Zabini flanking him and half a dozen more Slytherins trailing behind. Every face in the group was furious.

"Edward. Look at what that woman has done."

Draco slapped the paper down in front of him, and the front page carried its headline in a bold heavy enough to be read from the far end of the hall: Slytherin's Heir to the Dark Arts? A Candidate for the Third Dark Lord.

Edward picked it up, and as his eyes went down the column the air around him cooled by a degree that everybody standing near him felt.

Rita had done her work thoroughly. She began with the family, describing the House of Black as a pure-blood line steeped in darkness and appetite which had now produced another gifted son, and she was careful to note that he had been sorted into Slytherin. She noted also that he handled fire at a level which would trouble a grown wizard, and that an Auror might not care to test him on it.

Then she set his command of the arena beside Grindelwald's at the same age, and asked her readers whether the boy's hunger for power, and whatever it was that sat behind that composed young face of his, might not be pointing the same way for a third time in a century.

She had not stopped there either. The article went on to wonder aloud whether Dumbledore, in permitting somebody so dangerous to compete, had been careless with the safety of every other child in the castle, and whether the history of the House of Black was simply waiting its turn to repeat itself through him. She left the questions open, which was of course the entire point of asking them.

Zabini had his fists shut so tight that the knuckles cracked. "She is lying through her teeth. Heir to the Dark Lord. Your magic is the brightest thing any of us have ever stood next to, and it has nothing whatever to do with the Dark Arts."

Theodore pushed his glasses up, and behind the lenses his eyes had gone cold and flat.

"She wants your name because your name sells papers, so she has manufactured a question nobody was asking and printed it as though somebody had. What she has done to the history of the House of Black is not even internally consistent."

"I have already sent Crabbe and Goyle to gather up every copy in the castle," Draco said, and he had gone white with temper. "It is far too late. There were Ravenclaws whispering behind us on the way here, and looking at you while they did it."

Edward's grip closed on the paper until the sheet buckled and his knuckles stood out white against it.

It was not the slander itself that reached him, since he had expected some version of it from the moment she opened her notebook. What he could not stomach was the use she had made of his family: his father, Regulus, who had been buried alive in that house for years and who had finally spent his own life going against Voldemort once he understood what it was he had joined. And his mother, who had never touched any part of it, who had wanted nothing in this world except her research and enough time in which to finish it.

Rita had put the pair of them underneath that headline in order to sell a single morning's papers.

"Let it go, Draco." He breathed out slowly and set the paper down, and when he spoke again his voice was quiet and completely immovable. "People like her are not worth the temperature it costs to be angry at them. Anybody whose opinion I would actually want has sense enough to form their own, and there is no argument here that can be won by arguing."

⟦The doors of the Great Hall were still spilling students into the corridor when the others found them,⟧ and Harry came first with Ron and Hermione behind him and Cedric and Adeline a few paces further back. Harry had Edward's golden egg under one arm and Cedric carried his own, and the two shells threw off exactly the same hard light.

Harry took one look at the paper lying on the table and went red to the ears.

"Edward, this is disgusting. She has invented every word of it, and nobody who has met you believes a line."

Ron had gone as red as Harry. "We are not letting it stand. There has to be something we can do to get your name back off that page."

Hermione's frown had gone thin and analytical, which in her was a considerably more dangerous expression than anger.

"Rita Skeeter builds a case out of nothing at all and then calls the result journalism," she said. "There is not one verifiable fact in that article, only her own assumptions dressed as questions so that she cannot be held to them. We could complain formally to the Prophet and demand a printed retraction."

Cedric nodded slowly at that. "It would be worth doing. A piece like this does real damage if it is left to sit. We could go to Professor Dumbledore together with everybody willing to put a name to it, and ask him to step on it before it spreads further."

Adeline had said nothing until now, and when she did speak she spoke to Edward directly, in a voice that did not move.

"I know what your character is, and hers has no weight behind it. Papers that will print anything for the sale of it are always found out in the end. Do not carry this around for her."

Something in Edward's eyes warmed at that. Being believed without first having to argue for it was an unfamiliar feeling, and a better one than he had expected, and it took most of the chill out of the morning.

He shook his head all the same.

"Thank you, but no. A complaint means nothing to a woman like that, and an apology would only be another column she gets to write with my name at the top of it. We would be feeding her." He looked at the two eggs. "There is something better to spend the day on, so tell me about those instead."