Chapter 188: Bait

 

Rita's article hung over the school the way a low cloud hangs over a valley, and by breakfast the whole castle had gone stiff underneath it.

The air between the long tables in the Great Hall was very nearly frozen. Half-blood and Muggle-born students looked toward the Slytherin table with an open wariness that none of them bothered to disguise, and the whispers moving under the noise were like fine needles working their way through cloth.

A Ravenclaw girl spoke from behind her textbook, her eyes travelling across the tables toward Edward, her voice pitched low enough to be discreet and clear enough to carry. "Look at him. There has never been one decent person in the House of Black - pure-blood, that much power in his hands, and half of Slytherin trailing after him. Rita has to be right about it."

A Hufflepuff boy leaned nearer to his companion without seeming to notice he was doing it.

"They say he left the Horntail completely helpless in the first task," he said. "Fire that does that to a dragon is not far off the Dark Arts, whatever anybody calls it."

Draco brought his hand down flat on the table, and the silver cutlery jumped and rang.

"What exactly do you think you are saying? Edward built that strength himself, over years, and he has never once used it on a person who did not come at him first. And you believe Rita Skeeter?"

Theodore and Zabini were on their feet before he had finished, faint ripples of magic moving off both of them, and the Slytherins along the bench turned as one to look at the students who had been talking.

Edward reached out and pressed down on Draco's shoulder. The gold-red pattern at his fingers flickered once and went out, and his voice came level and entirely without heat.

"Draco. Sit down."

"But they are saying -"

A look from Edward stopped the rest of it where it was.

"It is not worth doing," Edward said, and he picked up a piece of bread and began spreading jam across it without any hurry whatsoever. "Rumour is like the mist in the Forbidden Forest. Left alone it drifts off with the wind. Argue with it and all you do is give it something to gather around."

His gaze went over the evasive, wary faces along the tables, and something close to helplessness did pass through him at the sight of them. To be handed a label that ugly on the strength of one woman's column was not a small thing, whatever he said aloud about it.

The feeling did not last long. Set beside the eyes that had been on him in the dark for days now, a hall full of whispering children was nothing worth spending temper on. Better to stop waiting altogether, and drag whatever was out there into the open where he could see it.

Night came down over Hogwarts like heavy black velvet laid across the towers. The lights went out floor by floor until only the corridor torches were left burning, and the shadows they threw made the stone walls seem to breathe.

In the Slytherin common room the fire cracked and settled. The black dog lay across Edward's feet with its ears turning at every small sound from the passage outside, and when the room had finally emptied it came apart into silver and left Sirius standing beside the sofa.

Sirius had come straight in from the grounds, and he did not sit down.

"The fluctuations off the Forbidden Forest are coming more often now, and whoever is making them has stopped being careful," he said. "Last night I found fresh traces of the Dark Arts at the treeline. Somebody is marking out a route, and a route gets marked for one reason only."

Edward closed the book on Runes across his knee and looked up at him.

"Then defending is not going to answer, Uncle Sirius. We do not know what they want, or how many of them have already got inside, or which night they decide it is worth doing. I would rather be the bait and have it happen when I choose it."

Sirius refused it before the sentence had properly landed, and his whole face changed as he did. "Absolutely not. We know nothing about their strength and nothing about what they have set up out there waiting for you, and being strong is not the same as being four men with the Dark Arts and no rules about using them."

Edward stood, and a faint gold-red halo rose around him as the flame magic turned over across his body and settled into a thin curtain of light.

"I can move through most of what they throw," he said. "Even the Unforgivables, so long as nothing lands square on me, I can shift out of the way of. And if it goes past what I can hold, I go up in my Animagus form and there is not one of them who can follow me into the air."

He took a step forward and his eyes hardened.

"But we learn nothing while they stay hidden. Make them show themselves and we find out who sent them and what they came for. Otherwise we are the ones being watched, every day, until they find the gap they are looking for. They only need it once."

Sirius said nothing for a long while. He stood looking at Edward, and what he found in that young and perfectly steady face was something he had no argument against, because the boy was right and had been right from the first sentence. Waiting was not a plan. Waiting was only exhaustion arriving slowly.

"All right," he said at last, and his voice had gone grave. "But not without preparation, and not on your terms alone. I will make you a Portkey to carry."

He was already reaching for the leather pouch at his hip.

"The wards here stop Apparition and they do not stop a Portkey. Grip it and you go, and nothing they have out there will interfere with it. The far end will be the Shrieking Shack, and I will be sitting in it the whole time you are gone. There is a passage from the Shack back into the school, so even if the night goes badly we have a way home."

"That works," Edward said. "It also keeps the fighting away from the castle. Whatever happens out there, it does not happen near anybody else's window."

Sirius took a small silver pendant from the pouch, round and smooth-edged, with an old protective rune cut into its face. It sat easily in a closed palm and would disappear under a collar without a line showing. After that he went through his luggage for a roll of yellowed parchment and a squat silver bottle labelled Portus Powder.

He laid the parchment flat and smoothed it until there was no crease anywhere in it, then set the pendant down dead in the centre, where the magic would gather. He raised his wand, took a breath, and spoke the word clearly.

"Portus."

A soft, dense gold light left the wand tip and settled over the pendant, which took it in and began to turn slowly on the parchment while the rune along its face lit from underneath.

Sirius did not take his eyes off it. He unstoppered the bottle and let a very small measure of the powder fall across the turning silver, and where the grains met the light they became little stars and sank into the metal as though something beneath were drawing them down.

The turning slowed as the powder went in. The gold faded out of it, and what replaced the gold was a steady, unremarkable pulse, with the rune burning a continuous silver that did not waver. The far end was set. Sirius touched the pendant with one finger, felt the shape of the thing hold firm under his hand, and let out a breath he had been keeping for some time.

He held the pendant out, and his tone had gone as serious as Edward had ever heard it. "It is finished, and it puts you in the Shack and nowhere else. You close your hand on it and you are gone. There is no delay in it and nothing out there can hold it shut. Understand me. The moment it stops being something you can manage, you do not think it over first."

Edward took the pendant. It was cold, and the cut of the rune pressed a shape into his palm that he could feel after he had let go of it. When he closed his fingers there was something steady underneath the silver, patient and asleep and waiting to be woken.

"I understand, Uncle Sirius." He put the chain over his head and pushed the pendant down inside his collar until it lay flat against his chest. "I am not going out there to be brave about it. If it turns, I leave."